An Islamic Bookshop

Today I went for a wander around one of the more multicultural areas of Nottingham. Not understanding the languages of overheard conversations, shop signs and products made me feel like a tourist going 'Ooooo! Look at all the foreign things!' It was like a mini holiday. Among the strange products I found ELDERFLOWER AND LEMON FANTA (see photo).

I found an Islamic Bookshop, which had a whole bookcase devoted to various editions of the Qur'an with different levels of prettiness and ostentation. I did wonder before going in whether all Qur'ans would be on top shelves, but I guess that only applies when the bookcase has more than just Qur'ans on it.

I browsed around: some of the sillier books were those with titles such as Hell & Its Denizens and The Inhabitants of Hell, which contained a lot of the usual fire and brimstone stuff common to religions with a damnation vs paradise afterlife dichotomy, but with a bit more casual sexism than you would get in a modern Christian work (while the Bible is horribly sexist, far more than the Qur'an in my opinion, Christianity has moved on quite a bit from it - women are allowed to speak in churches, for example): the author of one of these books quoted an ancient Muslim who had a vision of the queues for entering Heaven and Hell (waiting to get their Spiritual Passports stamped at the border crossing), remarking that there were far more women in the Hell queue because <old fashioned sexism>.

There was an extremely colourful book titled ONLY LOVE CAN DEFEAT TERRORISM.

I just had to buy A Concise Encyclopedia of Jinn. Islamic mythology features 3 intelligent species: angels, who God made from light; humans, who God made from clay; and Jinn, who God made from fire. Islamic angels do not have free will: they serve and obey God automatically. Humans and Jinn do have free will; Satan is a Jinn in Islamic mythology. Muhammad, as recorded in the Qur'an, preached to both humans and Jinn, invisible fire people. This fact is not mentioned often enough.

The book explains everything we 'know' about Jinn, using the Qur'an and Hadith (the secondary Muslim text) as main sources, and contains a lot of amusing speculation. Since Muhammad was the final prophet, who spoke to both Jinn and humans, and he implies that Jinn had prophets before him, the book concludes that Jinn culture probably has its own series of prophets leading up to Muhammad, but obviously we don't know anything about these invisible-fire-person prophets.

Jinn eat and drink. And fart. One story from the Hadith says that Satan times his farts to cover up the call to prayer. (I had to check the citation online: this is actually in the Hadith.)

Mythology be craycray.




A very short review of A Concise Encyclopedia of Jinn and Shaytan:

This book is either badly written or badly translated, or both. It is extremely repetitive and contains little beyond Qur'an and Hadith verses, the same ones often quoted multiple times throughout the book in different chapters.

It does not compare well against Fallen Angels by Bernard Bamberger, The Origin of Satan by Elaine Pagels, or A Gathering of Angels: Angels in Jewish Life and Literature by Morris Margolies. I was hoping for something of their quality, but from an Islamic perspective.